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GovTechGuy writes "Rep. Zoe Lofgren sat down with Roll Call to discuss her proposal to slow down the seizure of domain names accused of piracy by the federal government. Lofgren turned to Reddit for help formulating the bill, and also discussed whether her colleagues in Congress know enough about technology to make informed decisions on tech policy."

That is so not true, these people are our best and brightest! Hello.... you think congressmen don't have indoor plumbing? They know how tubes work, they know what happens when you put them in a series. They arn't stupid.

Johnson was obviously joking about stationing too many people on the island. Jackson-Lee honestly asked a NASA official if the Mars Pathfinder had photographed the flag planted by Neil Armstrong. Her office accused those who pointed out her stupidity of racism.

Some things like this are jokes. Some things are the speaking version of typos like Obama's 57 states. A rational person can't really believe that he thinks therea are 58 states. But others simply show ignorance. Jackson-Lee on the Mars Pathfinder was classic. Most Democrats and some Republicans when referring to guns are just displaying ignorance. Take Obama during that debate saying automatic rifles should be illegal, that's just ignorance. And then Romney

Sometimes the humor is too dry to many to catch. Also, some people aren't very good comedians and shouldn't be making jokes. Take Romney talking about opening the window in a jet. He has spent more time in private jets than most of us and obviously knows what's up, but his delivery was too deadpan. Many in the audience caught the joke (you do hear laughter), but he left himself open to claims of stupidity.

But Jackson-Lee, that one was real. She was asking an honest question.

a congressman who flatly and publicly calls all her colleagues idiots will soon find herself on no committees and with no support at anything she tries to do. Effectively rendering herself powerless and unable to do anything.

That's why the diplomatic phrasing.One of those word games politicians play.

That and MPAA chief and ex-Senator Chris Dodd complaining that Congress isn't bought enough [slashdot.org]. Dodd "suggested in a Fox News interview that Hollywood would cut off campaign funds for President Obama and other lawmakers who withdrew support. 'I spent 36 years on Capitol Hill and have great personal friends, and you'd think they'd know better.'"

Fortunately there has been a bit of snow here which has made most of the slick ice that happened with the freezing rain over the weekend have a bit more traction so you can walk on it.And theres no highs above freezing in the next 7 days forecast

These agencies of the US government are abusing the DNS system, our DNS system. We should replace or at least supplement DNS with something they can't abuse, something peer2peer. Nothing short of that will fix the DNS abuse we keep seeing.

Namecoin was a good idea but it's not going to work as currently implemented. Maybe something similar could.

We should replace or at least supplement DNS with something they can't abuse, something peer2peer.

Namecoin perhaps? It's a parallel DNS authority forked from Bitcoin.

Yeah I meantioned that. Seems you didn't get to the end of my comment. Anyway - namecoin as currently implemented is prone to exactly the same domain squating problem that conventional DNS suffers from. It needs a solution to that, and that's not so easy to design.

Maybe something like a small cost to register a name you already have a.com for ( provable by adding a text record to the.com ), and a very high cost if you don't. Maybe also a landgrab like phase where users can only register the domains they o

There is no "fix" for DNS. DNS is the fix. The DNS hierarchy basically handles a variety of cases. Any peer to peer system would either converge into DNS or devolve into a world with no Internet security. In a P2P system a compromised peer can spread misinformation far and wide and be pragmatically untraceble. Even a quorum system would allow a botnet to easily corrupt it.

If you want to replace DNS, you will need to replace SSL/TLS, PKI, SMTP, and several load balancing or content delivery solutions. You wo

"Web of Trust" systems would be a required basis to prevent compromise problems. I see many solutions to a botnet (group compromise) problem:
- Consider peer lifespan: How long has this peer been known-good?
- Consider change pattern: did google.com just change in the 2 places you trust, but not 15 others?
- Sign the data: Pull a whole block of name resolutions signed by "Google, MS, Apple, US, EU, & China" trusted keys, & only consider updates signed by a similarly-large group that mutually doesn't

Peer2peer doesn't have to mean the quorum wins, or that a single compromised node gets to screw everything up, or that a botnet can p0wn the whole network. What you are describing are problems with badly designed peer2peer.

If you want to see a well designed peer2peer application look up the bitcoin paper. On a technical level the bitcoin network and blockchain is very well designed regardless of its use as a currency.

Even if you fix DNS and make it p2p and censorship resilient, they'll force the ISPs and tier-1 backbone operators to withdraw BGP route advertisements to (AS hosting) sites they don't want you to visit. Now try to fix that!

Just take a look at Ted Stevens' "series of tubes" comment to see the ineptitude of congress. Lets say, for the sake of argument that Stevens was "dumbing it down" for his peers in congress and he was well versed in techno-babble. He himself felt that it was necessary because he felt that his peers didn't know wtf he would be talking about by speaking intelligently and, therefore, they were not capable of making informed decisions. Now, if we go to the side of the coin where we assume Stevens had no idea what he was talking about, then the person attempting to make an argument didn't know a damn thing about technology and we're still screwed.

I, for one, believe there should be some sort of test you need to pass to prove you have basic understandings of certain things before you can represent others. Or, better yet, choose people in the field to make policy; go to MIT, Stanford, IBM, Microsoft, Google, etc and make a tech representation senate. We don't NEED everyone in the government making decisions on everything; spread out the responsibility to those who are experts.

heh, its a nice thought but there are benefits for having someone there who does understand matters of law. however, they shouldn't be making policy choices regarding science, education, welfare, etc because they are probably not experts; especially if they are more concerned with re-election and campaign contributions to do what is best for the nation (though, that could be the case with anyone we choose to represent us; even experts)

I, for one, believe there should be some sort of test you need to pass to prove you have basic understandings of certain things before you can represent others.

Or at least to be on committees for certain subjects. Jackson-Lee was on the science committee at the time she asked her famous question about when the Apollo astronauts landed on Mars. Most Democrat reps are completely ignorant on guns, so should be kept away from any committee related to them. Consider Todd Akin who thinks a woman's body can automa

âoePhysical goods can be held in escrow or in a warehouse and they wonâ(TM)t necessarily decay or degrade,â

Many goods are perishable. Many that are not are also "part of a process" as well.

Imagine if a small-business brick-and-mortar movie store was credibly accused of piracy and the cops came in and seized ALL of the DVDs and waited weeks or months to return those that weren't reasonably suspected of being pirated. They value of that inventory would likely go down over time, especially for recently released titles.

Meant to include this link: http://www.rollcall.com/news/seeing_the_internet_as_a_place_for_freedom_to_flourish-220070-1.html [rollcall.com]
From the post:
"I don’t want to critique my colleagues. My degree was in political science, not computer science. So, you have to teach yourself. I spend as much time as possible trying to become a knowledgeable person. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’ve read a lot of books and I’ve taken some courses on how to do some simple programming. And I actually did some simple programming a long time ago in college. So I’m not an expert, but you need to have at least some concept of how the technology works to avoid making mistakes." --Lofgren

Meant to include this link: http://www.rollcall.com/news/seeing_the_internet_as_a_place_for_freedom_to_flourish-220070-1.html [rollcall.com]
From the post:
"I don’t want to critique my colleagues. My degree was in political science, not computer science. So, you have to teach yourself. I spend as much time as possible trying to become a knowledgeable person. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’ve read a lot of books and I’ve taken some courses on how to do some simple programming. And I actually did some simple programming a long time ago in college. So I’m not an expert, but you need to have at least some concept of how the technology works to avoid making mistakes." --Lofgren

What a novel concept: actually understand technology before legislating it.